The Redmond, Wash. software maker on Thursday will open to the public its service for searching the Internet after eighteen months of development. The company is trying to tap into the lucrative business now dominated by Google of combining Internet search and advertising.

Yep, every one of my sites are doing pretty well in the tech preview version and if MSN brings the kind of traffic it does with yahoo results ranking my sites or should I say, 1/4th of my sites.... I should start making the kind of money I used to make before google got a bug?

Again these two press releases contradict each other, as in what is exactly going to happen. IE will they be launching another beta version as we currently have all been playing with, or are they launching it live into msn.com search?

Will their search be the default results mopping up all the crappy searches that go no where or where the domain is not found... that would increase traffic nicely... without bombarding it in the first few days

Can't wait - 3 players in the market gives a much more even spread (hopefully)!

I sometimes see good interior page results. And then other times not. Strange. Still I think some more search competition is definitely positive. G tends to get stale, Y has its own idiosyncracies - competition should make them all better over time. Here is my question for the day: Does G have anything in common with Novell, Apple, Lotus, Netscape...? It's something for them to consider before its too late. I don't have a vested interest one way or the other, but I would prefer three healthy competitors.

Do you think we will see new (additional) searchers coming to our sites or only converted searchers (former googlers, yahooers, whatevers)? Are there any studies / theories available about the number of new clients they target?

I normaly don't pay much attention to these polls because they are normaly political but CNN readers [cnn.com] are not planning on switching.

I have always said that MS and Y can only gain a few points here and there but G will always be the search leader. It is just ingrained in people’s heads. CNN and most entertainment outlets have decided G is it. I don't know if it was on purpose but G has had perfect Public Relations. As far as I'm concerned it is clenched. Google and search are in people’s minds like Blowing your nose and Kleenex. People may use other brands but they always call it Kleenex and Kleenex will always be the dominant tissue.

MS has a long history of annihilating/acquiring marketleaders: wordperfect, quattro pro, paradox, netscape, etc. It would only be reasonable to expect MS to have a strong plan of exectution for their new search product to more than effectively compete against both G and Y, and we all know they have the resources, brains, channels, and business connections.

I think it's just a matter of time before MS search begins to grab serious marketshare from G.

I have always said that MS and Y can only gain a few points here and there but G will always be the search leader.

I think you are wrong. If Microsoft releases a search spider that visits sites and update content much more often than google (and this seems to be clearly the case), then lots of people will turn to microsoft.

Yahoo never made it because they index much less content than google does. In my case for a given site, yahoo shows 20 of my urls when google 1400. It will be a whole different story with Microsoft. They should strike where it hurts google: frequency, deepness of crawls. Why would I use google if another engine is refreshed much more often ? Not only MSN-BOT is almost alsways on my site, but it keeps adding new pages as I publish them. This is a clear plus, not only for webmasters, but for surfers.

Excite, HotBot, and AV were ingrained into people's heads in from 1997-2000.

If G is going to remain at the top of the heap, then they'll have to accomplish what no search engine has previously done, show more than "short term" staying power.

Google suffers from the same weakness that the above (3) one time SE leaders exhibited:

No direct source of Internet traffic.

He who controls the entry way to the web, owns the web, and that's why MSN and AOL are two of the top 5 web properties in terms of usage. Both at one time or another have had "pathetic" search functionality, yet remained strong.

Imagine MSN's market share with a strong search function. It can't do anything but increase. Why would an MSN subscriber go to Google if they can get good results right at home?

Yahoo has already done what G had better look into: either buy or partner with a major broadband network. Yahoo partnering with SBC was a great move to insure that a large percentage of internet users start at Yahoo every time they log on.

I say "Kudo's" to MSN for finally getting their "Search" together! A big "3" is much more healthy for my pocketbook, than a big "1.5"...

Google was cool for the consumer because it was "new" and "trendy".. But anything new and trendy goes stale after time. Though I still use G for much of my search on the web, I among other's have noticed declining relevance and quality in G's SERPS over the last few months.

Now I just wish AOL would get it together, and buy Ask/Teoma, Wisenut, or some proven search technology, improve it, and give us a Big 4 again!

There is also another list of MS failures. Also you can not compare the 80's and 90's to now. The Internet of the 2000's is a whole differnt thing. The computer age has hit a critical mass in the past few years. Back then there were so few people on the net that it was easy to sway things.

I was not saying that MS or Y did not have anything. Just like Puffs makes a lot of money but they still don't sell as much as Kleenex. Dr. Pepper is a great drink but they don't sell as much as Coke. My point is they will not pass G. They can get closer but not catch.

Never say never - remember they have the OS that most users use - so if they can sync this with that (i.e. longhorn) they could have a very good shot.

Whilst google has heaps of cash and goodwill - if there's a better search tool out there slowly but surely people will move with the information - likewise if it's crap - they won't and M$ just wasted a whole load of money.

So add that to the users through the OS and they will be neck and neck if not ahead of google - especially if Yahoo doesn't buck up it's ideas!

I know which horse I would rather back and I'd certainly consider selling a good proportion of them thar GOOG and YAHOO stocks to cash in.

ogletree, i couldn't agree with you more than in the short-run G is and will be the clear leader, but i hesitate to say that'll be the case in the medium to long-run. BTW, i for one am happier than hell to see MS aggressively enter the SE market--it's certainly good for all of us to see the added competition.

og, For failures you must mean having an MS operating system on virtually every computer in the world?

Touting MS as Dr. Pepper or Puffs in both your comparisons, is a bit off course. Do you realize how many GooglePlex's you could cram into MS's Redmond complex? :)

Microsoft treated MSN like a stepchild division for many years. They feel now is the time to dominate the search market, and with their past history for market domination, they stand a good chance to repeat what they've done "over and over".

I love that Google became what they are basically on viral popularity (With a little help from Yahoo), but let's get real here. Google wasn't even a publicly traded company until a couple of months ago.

If MS comes out and publicly states they are going to dominate a specific vertical market, you can bet they are going to throw some dollars that way.

I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft for other reasons, but every one of my company's Dell PowerEdge servers runs Windows Server, our DB clusters are MS SQL, and on and on. There are a million companies just like mine, that are 100% MS houses. The rev's driven from online search are miniscule in the whole scheme of the online world.

I still say, MS bring on new search, and put a another major player on the table. It's healthy for any website owner, SEM firm, and the Internet in general.

Imagine MSN's market share with a strong search function. It can't do anything but increase. Why would an MSN subscriber go to Google if they can get good results right at home?

Agreed. I get a ton of MSN traffic ALREADY. Once they make the switch to their own system (which, according to the tech preview, I appear to be doing very well in), and it gains momentum, Google could be in trouble.

Keep in mind the low-level of "techiness" of non-web professionals.

My mother loves the web...but she still to this day types her URLs in the google search box (only because I set it as her start page). Once MSN starts pushing search HARD, I think we'll see a big shift.

personally, I think the only long-term solution for Google is to purchase AOL.